[The Blogosphere’s Soft Corruption](http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/09/11/the-blogosphere’s-soft-corruption/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed: monday-note (Monday Note))

2105:

Frédéric Filloux on TechCrunch, Arrington, AOL, CrunchFund, etc.  If you’ve avoided this story (probably for great reasons), Filloux grounds it in considering the soft corruption of journalistic ethics.

I get the sense there’s mostly a lot of shrugging about the # crunchgate fiasco and that’s a damn shame. Folks in tech are mostly scared to touch it because Arrington, gaping asshole that he is, wields a lot of power and none of the valley sycophants with their shitty c-list startups want to risk their fake money by opening their mouths.

But Arrington and this whole mess are really a distillation of a truly terrible, treacherous trend and dark side of personal publishing: that pay for play is real, it’s been legitimized and it’s here to stay. Every low-rent tech vlogger who takes a free camera or mommy blogger who gushes about her amazing new washing machine (gratis from Kenmore, be sure to check the FCC guidelines on that before hitting publish, WINK) is perpetuating this problem and it’s only going to get worse.

The lesson here seems to be that the only people who care are a handful of old media journalists. Ethics. LOL.